I was recently chatting with the current President of PASS, Thomas LaRock (Twitter | Blog), and Pieter Vanhove (Twitter | Blog), a prominent SQL Server consultant and expert in Belgium, about how I go about building and presenting a full-day technical seminar. In the SQL Server world, we tend to call these ...

These would be good mentors - me plus Adam Machanic, and Klaus AschenbrennerNot long ago, John Sansom (Twitter | Blog) kicked off a SQL Community Project #DBAJumpStart by asking 20 successful and experienced SQL Server professionals this exact question:''If you could give a DBA just one piece of advice, what would it ...

First off, I should apologize for not blogging in quite a while. I've been traveling extensively and, because traveling can be so exhausting, I usually have to queue up blog posts to hit while I'm traveling in order to remain active while on the road. I didn't do that for these most recent trips. And, as you can see, there's quite a ...

In the same way that the finest presentations involve much more than the simple relaying of information, the finest software demos are much more than just presenting features. REMEMBER: The goal of a demo is to INSPIRE the audience to use the software/technology, not to teach them every nuance of software/technology.I've ...

My Favorite Magazine
There are a lot of reasons why I love The Economist magazine and pay over $100 per year for a subscription. First of all, it summarizes all of its news articles, big and small, in the first 4-5 pages of the magazine. Don't have time to read the entire issue? No problem, how does 20 minutes work for you? Second, it ...

Whiners and Whingers Get Wedgies
Yes, I deserve a Wedgie
There I was, just a couple weeks back, whining that I wasn't getting
tagged by friends when a new meme comes out. Sure enough, when my
friend, Paul Randal (blog | twitter),
starts a new meme with me as one of the first handful of people tagged,
it's taken me a full ten days to ...